PCB Friday: The State of Home PCB Manufacturing

We live in a truly amazing time. If you need a custom circuit board, all you have to do is design it in your favorite EDA (electronic design automation) package and send it off to a PCB manufacturer. They will then send you real, actual, high-quality PCBs, often in a week or less, at prototype prices that are typically well under $100 for the batch.

It's a truly mind-blowing level of service. But... what if you can't wait a week? What if you need your circuit boards right now? Below are several options for turning out a PCB in just a few minutes. While home manufacturing might not have all the options or polish of a large board house, if you want to iterate in days — hours, even — not weeks, this may be a good solution.

Method 0: Breadboard, perfboard, freeform, simulation

Before you go down the routes listed below, first consider if you would be better served by more traditional prototyping methods: plugging things into a breadboard, soldering connections on a perfboard, or just simulating your circuits in your preferred EDA package.

These more manual methods certainly have their tradeoffs. However, they allow for more hands-on modification and require less of a commitment tools-wise than "printing" a circuit board — whatever form that takes.

Ferric chloride etch

This basic idea is that you get a copper-clad board, then cover the areas that you want to remain as conductive traces and fill zones. Then you etch away everything else. Having never actually tried this myself, I'm not sure I'd have the patience for the arts-and-crafts style work involved, including printing, alignment, ironing, drilling, and... making sure you're not actually producing a mirrored image of your intended circuit. You also have to deal with ferric chloride, a substance described as "the most evil stuff" by Stephen Hawes, who factors heavily into the latter part of this article.

Equipment costs for this type of PCB manufacturing are quite low, and the results can certainly be usable. At the same time, you won't get extras like solder mask, silkscreen labeling, and multiple layers without adding a few more carefully aligned arts-and-crafts steps to the process. This Hackster project goes over the basics if you care to explore further.

Printing

While there have been some developments in the world of conductive filament, as of this writing (and correct me if I'm wrong, contact info at the end) you can't simply press a button on your 3D printer and have a nice circuit board pop out. You can, however, (2D) print with conductive ink on a more traditional substrate to carry your circuit's electrons.

As shown in the above video, the Voltera V-One prints circuits, cures the board, then adds solder paste to the newly-added circuitry for component placement. What's really neat about this device is that all the heating is done onboard, and it can even drill holes for vias (the conductors for which then need to be manually riveted in).

At a list price of $3,499.99 + shipping + taxes, the V-One is a significant investment. However, if it fits your use case, it could be well worth it.

Milling

Like the etching process outlined earlier, the PCB milling starts out with a copper-clad board, but instead of etching away material with ferric chloride, areas are cut away with a tiny end mill. The big advantages of this process are that you don't have to use or dispose of chemicals, and you have the equipment readily available to drill holes and cut out the outline of the board.

The big expense here is the router, along with bits that you may break over time. On the other hand, such a device has potential uses well beyond PCB manufacturing, so it may be easier to justify as a multi-purpose tool.

Laser etch

While printing, milling, and chemical etching are viable PCB-manufacturing methods, it seems that the real cutting edge in home (or on-site business) PCB manufacturing involves the use of a laser. And the aforementioned Stephen Hawes appears to be at the vanguard of this process's development.

Hawes' open source LumenPnP (not to be confused with Severance's Lumon corporation) picks 'n places components, so tackling the PCB manufacturing portion itself would seem to be the logical next step. At the same time, laser etching isn't without complications or tradeoffs.

In the earlier video above, Hawes shows how he was able to use a fiber laser to ablate FR1 copper-clad sheets to form traces, in a similar manner to how PCB milling works. He even outlines how to add solder mask and silkscreen layers, which are nice touches. The problem is that if you want to produce a 2-layer board, you need to manually insert rivets (a la the V-One's process), which is a rather janky, or at least sub-optimal, solution for a number of reasons.

But there is another solution, shown in Hawes' recent "Last PCB You'll Ever Buy" video:

This rather ingenious "Viagrid" solution (covered here on Hackster) sidesteps the how-do-you-via-at-home problem by getting boards pre-via'd from a manufacturer and using them as templates. All you have to do is design around the existing vias, then make sure everything is lined up correctly when cutting/ablating.

Yes, this methodology comes with tradeoffs, but you can literally get your two-layer board manufactured in under an hour. If you then put it on a pick-and-place machine like the LumenPnP (or do your own quick human-PnP job), you can go from design to finished board in about 90 minutes. Compare this to a — still very impressive — week or four from your favorite board house, and you've cut your board development time down by orders of magnitude.

Of course, your final product will most likely be sourced from a board house, so there still may be some back and forth as things get finalized. Even so, if you go from rev 0 to rev 4 in a flash, a relatively slow rev 4 to finalized rev 5 step may be entirely acceptable.

Manufacture yourself or send out?

While some of the methods outlined above might be beneficial for your particular situation, as a solo creator with limited garage space and an aversion to exotic chemicals, I send my boards out to be made. Thus, this article is largely about what other people are doing in the space.

Board houses typically do excellent work, both US domestic and overseas. At the same time, if I make a mistake, it takes me a week — or weeks — to find this out. Worse yet, sometimes I want to change something when my board is being manufactured, leaving me to wait for a design that I've already revised.

As with anything decision in engineering, you'll have to weigh the tradeoffs when deciding how to manufacture your boards, including equipment and space needs, time required, finished product quality, and actual monetary expenditure. In the case of my Arduino Opta breakout shown above, I used a professionally produced PCB to easily connect jumpers to the Arduino Opta's AUX port. There's no shame in getting your boards professionally made, but realize there are other options!

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading my biweekly PCB Friday column! I'm looking forward to sharing more PCB-related knowledge and insights here, and I hope you'll follow along for the journey. You can also find me on YouTube @jeremycook, read my semi-technical musings at TechAdjacent.io, or email me at hi@jeremyscook.com!

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